Death Touching- 7 Archaeologists and Anthropologists Dealing in Death to Follow

Posted on February 2, 2012

Here is a list of seven great blogs that deal with osteoarchaeology (bones), the human body of the past, and burials.

If you want to follow all of these blogs I have created an RSS feed using google bundles- here it is.

*The term death touchers in the title comes from once when I and a osteoarchaeologists told someone we were archaeologists and their response was “you dig up people? Your like a death toucher.” The name has since stuck to the osteoarchaeologists.

Katy Meyer’s blog- “This blog was created to serve as a way for me to keep up to date with current mortuary and bioarchaeology news, as well as a way to work on my own scholarly writing. Since then it has evolved into a way for me to explore a variety of regions, theories, interpretations, perspectives, and methods in the discipline.”

“So, you’ve made it to Bring Out Your Dead, a blog about all things, well, dead.
Come here to read mainly about funerary archaeology, but feel free to occasional expect posts about osteology, rituals, and anything else weird, wonderful and probably grim that takes my fancy.

It might seem obvious, but if you are one of those squeamish types, this might not be for you.”

This blog is from a “freelance osteoarchaeologist specialising in human and animal bones from archaeological sites” who loves archaeology. “this is a blog about my projects with bones and community archaeology events.”

” While examples from “the past” are sometimes brought into discussions in allied fields like anthropology or gender studies, and material histories are sometimes included with documentary histories, most archaeologists, myself included, complain that these uses misrepresent both what we know, and how we know, about past ways of being men and women. The power of the past to naturalize what we should question is something many feminist archaeologists, myself included, want to combat. I know from teaching hundreds of students from across the university that the best way to make others understand the power of the past, and its dangers, is to engage directly with primary materials. So the book project is paradoxical: it provides a single-authored text that has as its goal not to be simple straight-forward story-telling about the past, but rather, clear and compelling narrative about doing analysis of the material traces of past lives.”